In recent years, due to the popular application of the personal digital products such as the flash drive, digital camera, cell phone and MP3, the market of the non-volatile memory increases rapidly, which may be the rapidest increasing market among all kinds of memory ICs. Currently, the main product of the non-volatile memory is the flash memory. However, the current flash memory elements will gradually confront a challenge of physical limitation when a technology generation of 65 nm comes, and the flash memory further has many limitations such as the slow operation speed and the short operation period. Therefore, it is necessary to develop more capable memory technology for satisfying a huger market in the future.
Recently, in the non-volatile memory technology field, a technology for a resistive memory is newly developed and very promising. The main structure of the resistive memory is a MIM (metal-insulator-metal) structure, which is analogous to that of a capacitor, and a transition metal oxide layer is adopted as the material of the insulator layer. Therefore, many semiconductor factories already have the capability to produce the resistive memory. Furthermore, the temperature required for manufacturing the elements of the resistive memory is not high, so it is easy to integrate the manufacturing process thereof into the relative element or circuit processes.
In the current technology for operating a resistive memory, a forming process is usually to be performed initially, i.e. a bias is applied on the element, for bringing a soft breakdown in the oxide layer of the element, so as to increase the leakage current of the element, so that the element may start to have the characters of the resistive memory. However, this forming process is time-consuming in the whole process. An oxide layer having more defects needs to be adopted if the time of the forming process is to be shortened, but a worse quality of the oxide layer results in a bad endurance of the element, which makes the element unable to endure large frequency of operation.
In order to overcome the drawbacks in the prior art, a non-volatile memory cell and the fabrication method thereof are provided.